“Miri!” Anne chastised lightly when the redheaded mage suggested looting the corpses in such a callous manner.

  “What? It’s not like they’re gonna be needing the stuff anyway,” Miri argued. “Besides, if these guys were really killed by the Chimeragon here, they’d probably want to be avenged. And if we’re gonna be the ones doing the avenging, we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

  “Well…yes, I suppose you’re right. Even so, we should at least treat the dead with some amount of respect,” Anne suggested. “I’ll need to perform a prayer for them so that their souls can be laid to rest in the Great Beyond. It’s the least we can do before you desecrate their corpses.”

  “Desecrate their corpses? Geez, aren’t you exaggerating just a little? You made it sound worse than it actually is.”

  “In the religious beliefs of Salem, one should always treat a corpse with as much respect as possible. Besides, even though we’ve destroyed the ghosts, we haven’t truly eliminated them. After a period of time, they will eventually reform themselves and haunt the area once more. The only way to truly get rid of them is by putting their souls to rest, either through a proper burial or a prayer. If we leave them as is, they will surely return sooner or later.”

  Miri let out an annoyed sigh. “Yeah, but do we really have to do this now? The Chimeragon may still be lurking around here somewhere and we don’t want to be sitting ducks when it happens to come by.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “This won’t take long. A couple of minutes, at the most. I promise.”

  “It’s that quick, huh? Oh, alright then. Just hurry up and get it over with.”

  Anne closed her eyes and muttered a prayer under her breath as she wrote the symbol of a pentacle in the air, drawing it out with a thin trail of bright-yellow light emitted from her fingertips. The pentacle symbol flashed briefly before bursting into particles of yellow light that flew into the air before surrounding the corpses, imbuing them with some sort of magical effect before vanishing.

  Miri couldn’t quite hear the words that Anne had muttered, though she assumed it was somewhat similar to a Christian prayer—one that’s used by priests and such to lay restless souls to peace. In the world of “Runehunter Chronicles”, the religion of Wicca had sort of eclipsed Christianity as the predominant religion around these areas. With that said, there were still some small, remnant traits from Christainty that had sort of been absorbed, integrated, and altered into this version of Wicca.

  Instead of making the sign of the cross, it’s making the sign of the pentacle. Instead of the Holy Trinity, it’s the Holy Pentacle—one that consisted of the five elements that made up the components of the Witch Goddess Salem, which was more or less the Jesus Christ equivalent of Wicca.

  Given how blended up this fictionalized version of the religion had become, it’s probably a far cry from the actual religion of Wicca in real-life, sort of how most medieval settings in RPG games were a far cry from the actual medieval setting of the Middle Ages.

  After the prayer was done, Miri and Anne began carefully looting the bodies to see if there’s anything of value.